Jews on the Prairie

Eight miles from Garden City, Kansas, in a remote landscape of corn fields without end, punctuated only by pheasants and blackbirds, lies an unexpected discovery: several gravestones, the only physical remains of Beersheba, a Jewish agricultural colony established in 1882.
Beersheba's existence was an outgrowth of the surge in Russian Jewish migration to the United States in the 1880s. After Russia's Czar Alexander II was assassinated in 1881, his son, Czar Alexander III, rescinded his father's more lenient policies toward Jews. Overnight, Russian Jews were prohibited from owning or...Read more ...